lhuser, little buddy you are wrong.
He needs to use 80 wire udma/ata133 cables. Round and shielded would be the cable of choice. Modern systems can sense the cable and will limit the speed the device on the cable can go. So if he uses a 40 wire cable with a device that can go udma 5, it may only reach to udma 3 or 4. Not the full potential of the device.
And if the bios is set to auto configure it will retrieve the data from the chip in the device and set itself up. You CAN manually configure a drive but unless it's an older than dirt drive why bother?

Oh, so that's the difference between the small wires and the big ones? I hope it's that. Never knew that though.

Yeah, let's get this terminology straight. All the IDE cables have 40 pin connectors. The better cables (UDMA66 and up) have 80 conductors, the cheapos have 40 wires. The 80 wire (conductor) cables have better immunity to crosstalk and noise pickup. Therefore, the 80 conductor cables should provide more reliable and error-free operation.

If ya mobo supports ata100 then go with the 80 wire cables as they support ata66 and upwards. The DVD burner will not run at its full potential because the mobo is gonna let it down, not ya cables. It can only run as fast as the slowest part

Well im assuming ya gonna use a SATA HDD, so for gaming it should be fine. Ya CD and DVD burning might be a little slower, but thats not really a problem if it takes a bit longer to burn a disc, or is it?